Newspapers in the Social Media Era: continuous innovation and organizational change

The consequences of online technologies for the newspaper industry have been enormous, both for the production and the consumption of news. The economics of news production and distribution has been radically altered and the context of the economic crisis and related fall in advertising revenues have further accentuated the need of experimenting with new distribution models as well as of structural changes. Deep changes have also emerged in the newsgathering process as well as in consumers behaviors. The drivers of online news include new technologies, changing media use and social factors such as increased mobility and a desire to participate in the creation of online content through social media features. Nevertheless, the organizational, technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications of the explosion of the social media phenomena and the consequent demand for change are not well understood right now. Newspaper companies have to built culture, skills, processes and technology to deal with the emerging readers' behaviours. Newspapers in the Social Media Era focuses on the least covered aspects in the previous literature in online technologies in newspaper companies: transformation processes in structural and organizational aspects.